After the article about andUNITE the German blog IT Frontal published an interview with Bernd and Christian, two of the founders of andUNITE. The interview ist not only about what andUNITE is all about but also about how everything started and what some of the future ideas are like. You will also find a few notes about the philosophy, the idea and the use of andUNITE.
Thank you, Thomas Sprenger, also for the inspiring talk about “swarm intelligence” and related topics.

You are getting closer to the andUNITE sensation of this month: andUNITE is going to show up at the famous German Schmidt & Pocher late night show! Wanna watch how our co-founder Bernd is going to buy “Boogle” live at the show? Then tune in on May 29th at night.

You think this is crazy and a spoof? Well, then read this message we received a few days ago:

The dutch news site NUzakelijk published an article and a video/interview about andUNITE. The interview was recorded at The Next Web 2008 conference in Amsterdam.

Ashok helped to put up another andUNITE poster in Surat, India. Early this year we already published some photos from other andUNITE posters in Surat. Thank you Ashok for your support! We also especially like the colors on these photos…

At The Next Web 2008 conference in Amsterdam Christian Schmidkonz, one of the founders of andUNITE.com, gave an interview on the red couch on, well, the Internet in general. Level3 conducted quite a lot of interviews with some of the VIPs and IPs and less IPs during the conference. How exciting to sit on this famous red couch - and being not allowed to look into the camera…

As already mentioned in a previous blog entry andUNITE is currently supported by a MBA team of the Cambridge Judge Business School. They already came to Munich for a workshop and we went to Cambridge for another workshop. Tomorrow will be another workshop with them, this time in Berlin.

Who are they? Well, they all are fascinating personalities! Here are some photos:

From left to right: Tomokazu Ogawa, an award winning architect from Tokyo, Carol Wong Hoi Yin, a highly experienced logistic manager from Hong Kong, Gek Chuin Tang , responsible for marketing and leasing of State land and buildings for Singapore Land Authority and Johnny Zhang, a well known former MTV presentator from Beijing.

And there is Ed Aruffo with a twenty-one year U.S. Naval Officer experience (you can read more about him here and here):

Except for the last photos (with Ed on the right (top) and left (bottom)) all pictures were taken in Munich, Germany, after our first workshop. It’s an honor to be able to work together with such an international team. And: It is a lot (!) of fun! Unfortunately this is only a temporary co-operation…

Thanks to our Cambridge MBA supporter Ed Aruffo we came up with a nice, “emotional” tag line: “Find a warm body besides cold links with andUNITE”. This is what obviously got stuck in the minds of the Next Web 2008 attendees and bloggers. (Ok, this post is kind of late, but we still had to mention this…)

Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote on his blog post: “The German guys from andUNITE have a really good idea: they want to match people by their search terms. Co-founder Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande told The Next Web Blog: “Christian Schmidkonz and me were both frustrated with the boring and lonely process of web search. We thought that it would be always more useful to be able to ask someone who knows something about a problem or question instead of browsing though pages and pages of more or less interesting search result links. We thought that the value of a search term must be much higher than just being used for retrieving links from a database.” Of course this arouses some doubts about privacy. Well, don’t worry about that, since you can also remain anonymous. But are you sure you want to hide your identity? Since the guys not only promise you interesting search results, they also stated that you might find ‘a warm body besides cold links.’”

Mehrmals am Tag “klingelt” das Handy von Ashok, unserem Praktikanten aus Surat, Indien. “Klingeln” kann man aber eben eigentlich gar (!) nicht sagen, sondern es singt! Und zwar: “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” von “Tujhe Dekha To” - oder ist es “Tujhe Dekha To” von “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge”? Wohl eher letzteres, denn die Worte “Tujhe Dekha To” kann inzwischen das ganze Büro mitsingen. Was auch immer es eigentlich bedeuten mag… Bestimmt ist der Song in Indien ein riesen Hit! “Underground” ist er dem Video nach zu schliessen wahrscheinlich eher nicht…